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When Toby Alfred was applying to college, her mother told her, “You figure out the best place you can get into and I’ll figure out a way to pay for it.” In retrospect, she says, that was “a tremendous gift.” Neither of her parents were college graduates; her mother was a bookkeeper; her father worked as an office manager and money was tight. Alfred got a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon and took out loans to pay for her MBA from the University of Chicago.

These credentials served her well. Today she is a high-level executive at Progressive Direct Insurance in Cleveland, where more than 6,000 people report to her and she reports directly to the company president. From the experience of recruiting others and being hired herself, she’s convinced that “educational pedigree is a foot in the door,” she says. “It’s a reflection of how résumés get sorted in a competitive marketplace.”

So when it came time to educate her own two kids, she drew down the savings in the 529 plans she had set up and sold employee stock options to foot the bill. (For more about education savings plans, see my FORBES magazine article, "The Benefits And Traps Of Section 529 College Savings Plans.") All totaled, their education was a solid, $500,000 investment, she says.

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Not all of her classmates from the Bronx High School of Science would agree. They will be celebrating their 40th reunion this weekend, and in anticipation of that event have been using a private Facebook page to reflect on the choices they made since collecting their diplomas in 1973. One of the threads that caught my attention as a member of the class started with the question, “Private university or public? Is the outcome any different?" It’s an issue of special interest since I have a 16-year-old son who will be applying to college next fall.

I contacted several of my high school classmates off-line, and interviewed them about where they went to college, what they have done since, and how their own experiences influenced their role as parents in the college application process.

One thing they agreed on is that what you do with an education is at least as important as the school you attend. And a lot depends on the child. But with the economic recovery lagging and a shortage of jobs for older workers, some are questioning whether a high-priced college education is worth it.

"I don't think it would have mattered where I went," says Marc Beckerman, answering the question he posted to our Facebook group. He majored in biomedical engineering at Boston University, used his scientific background for the first six years of his career and then transitioned into sales. Like many boomers, he has seen his career and ability to finance his children's education derailed by a prolonged economic downturn. (See my post, “In A Brutal Economy, Boomers Rewrite The Next Chapter.”)

During the tech boom in the Boston area, where he still lives, there was a time when “you could put your résumé out in the morning and have a new job in the afternoon,” he recalls. When the bottom fell out at the start of the millennium he was in his 40s, competing against new graduates for jobs. Since then, he’s worked as a driver for a car service (“a great networking job” since you never know who’s in the back seat), sold mattresses and hearing aids. And in the middle of it all, his children were applying to college.

His daughter, 29, went to Bridgewater State College and has become a professional photographer. His son, 26, the better student, went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst – a public Ivy – majored in sociology and criminal justice, but had trouble finding a job after graduation. For the past four years he has worked as a salesman at Sleepys, the mattress store, where Beckerman says he’s “making more money than his old man.”

Life intervened, too, shortly before Carol Cohen’s daughter was ready for college. Cohen always figured she would pay for private college by refinancing one of the 26 New Jersey rental properties that she co-owned with her husband. But their divorce, when her daughter was 16, put the kibosh on that plan and they had not saved for college. She spent more than two years at Middlesex Community College, saving the family $80,000, Cohen figures, and has just transferred to Rider University.

Cohen, who got her BA from Lehman College, part of The City University of New York system, and works as a realtor, says, “a college education has enhanced my career, but it has not created one.” Nor did it bankrupt her family. The total cost of her own college tuition was about $500, which would buy one year’s worth of books these days, she says.

Hillary Kelbick always regretted that she didn’t go to Vassar – her father insisted that the State University of New York at Albany was "good enough." So when her son Max, 25, applied to college, she told him he could go anywhere he wanted.

He chose Tufts, where a lot of his classmates were wealthy and he had difficulty keeping up with their spending habits. Kelbick says she found it “troubling that his peers were drinking martinis instead of pitchers of beer.”

She was proud to have enough in a 529 plan to cover his total tuition of more than $220,000. For many years Kelbick, a marketing and communications consultant, and her husband, Dennis Chalkin, a photographer, made saving for college a higher priority than building a nest egg for their own retirement. (She’s 57 and he’s 65.) If Max wants to go to grad school, he will have to pay for it himself, she says. And he was responsible for the credit card bills he amassed keeping up with the rich kids at Tufts. Although his Boston connections helped him land a job with a local politician, in retrospect he would have done just as well at Rutgers University, a state school in New Jersey, where the family lives, Kelbick says.

Her younger son Charlie, 21, is a senior at the University of Delaware and happy there. His total tuition came to $160,000 and if he wants to attend graduate school, there is money left in the 529 plan to pay for that. “Does the fact that we spent so much more for Max make it better for him? No,” she says.

“We thought we were being good parents to let our kids go anywhere,” she adds. “We were seduced by that. And at the end of the day, it wasn’t worth it.”

Our classmate Michael Brown, an environmental engineer in Boston who went to Harvard for both undergrad and grad school, also sent his older child to a private college – his daughter Julie, 23, studied film at Emerson. His son Aaron, 19, applied to both public and private colleges, got into both and opted for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Brown never told him to choose the less expensive school, but he did say, “if you choose a more expensive private college, make sure there’s a reason to spend the extra $30,000 a year.”

Between a 529 plan and his own savings Brown could cover the whole college bill. Still, he suggested his son borrow $5,000. He wanted him to have some skin in the game.